


like a clockmaker fixes time

by mimosaeyes



Category: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow - Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Canon Autistic Character, Chronic Illness, Developing Relationship, Families of Choice, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Recovery, Self-Acceptance, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:34:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23294083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: Thaniel and Mori find a new normal — with themselves, with each other.Set in the two years between them returning to London, and the performance of the Joy Symphony.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 21
Kudos: 107





	like a clockmaker fixes time

**Author's Note:**

> Title from I’ll Keep You Safe by Sleeping At Last.
> 
> Thanks to my beta and co-headcanoneer, [animaginaryquill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/animaginaryquill).
> 
> Posted on World TB Day, which is held every year on 24 March.

Thaniel wakes first, for once, in the quiet and chill of early morning. He blinks blearily, then glances over to confirm what he already knows from the warmth of Mori beside him, the slow deep breaths against his neck.

He moves gingerly as he extricates himself, but as it turns out, he needn’t have bothered. Mori is deeply asleep. Between being held captive, drugged, and experimented on, this is the first proper rest he’s had in weeks. He doesn’t even stir as Thaniel eases the door closed behind him, minding the one creaky bit of floor right by the threshold.

They’d arrived late the previous evening, and bid each other tired goodnights after a quick supper Mori put together. Six hadn’t even demanded a story before retreating to her attic, eager to return to the familiarity of her cot and lightbulb collection. Thaniel was already sitting on the bed in his pyjamas when he heard a knock at his door.

His breath had caught in his throat, in a way that had nothing to do with troubled lungs. He’d paused there for a long moment — almost too long. It took Mori’s squeaking step to snap him out of it. “Wait!” he’d cried out in a panic, in a hoarse whisper. “Come in.”

Mori had looked so small and tentative, barely entering the room before taking another two steps back to shut the door. To set him at ease, Thaniel played along as if this wasn’t the first time Mori had come to his bedroom instead of the other way around. He got under the covers, leaving the far corner of them flipped invitingly open, and waited for Mori to get in too. Which he did in semi-darkness, turning off the lights before crossing the room with cautious steps.

He’d wrapped himself around Thaniel, tucked his arm over his chest and cradled him close enough to feel each breath in and out. All the while moving slowly enough that Thaniel could stop him with a word or even less. The slightest tensing up.

“Is this okay?” Mori had asked at last, the words rusty bronze in the air, and Thaniel suddenly realised how unnerving his silence must have been for a newly ex-clairvoyant.

“It’s — yes,” he said, startled. “It’s…”

He didn’t have the words for the bubble of gold in his chest that Mori’s presence gave him. After another while, sounding oddly strangled, he merely said, “Thank you.”

He hopes that Mori understands everything he meant by it.

What does one do on one’s first full day back in England in several weeks?

Make tea, obviously.

Thaniel takes his cup out to the garden, because the air looks clear and promises to be crisp. He doesn’t expect to find Dr Haverly out there too, and almost laughs when the man calls out a hearty greeting to him. “I’d ask how your health is,” he says, “but you were well enough to cause an international scandal, so.”

In the second it takes him to respond, Thaniel ponders what sort of newspaper headlines have been written about him, and how many appalled telegrams from Annabel are awaiting him in the post office. Then he shrugs. “I manage.”

Dr Haverly is cataloguing Thaniel’s cuts and bruises with a professional’s eye. “Maybe don’t go back to Japan next fog season, if it’s going to be this exciting each time. What other options has your watchmaker got?”

Thaniel sips from his tea, stifles the ever-latent fear that the possessive _your_ elicits, and replies, “I think he mentioned a house in Cornwall.”

The kettle’s still hot, so he makes tea for Mori, tops up his own cup, and heads back to the bedroom. He’s belied his own faint hope that the other man will sleep in. Mori twitches awake and looks immediately anxious when he sees that the other side of the bed is empty. Then he notices Thaniel in the doorway, and relaxes again, which is more gratifying than it should be.

“I’m going back to sleep,” Thaniel warns him. “Don’t judge me. I know you think it’s decadent.”

“Not at all, you deserve to indulge yourself,” Mori murmurs approvingly. Freshly conscious and still drowsy, he rumbles in a rich warm gold.

Mori accepts his tea and lays half-propped up in bed while Thaniel snuggles himself cozy again, in the perfect nook formed by the pillow and Mori’s shoulder. From that angle, he watches him, taking in the shadows under his eyes. Cajolingly, he says, “You’re still tired, too.”

Mori only hums, and begins to stroke Thaniel’s hair.

When he next awakens and ventures outside, the mail has come in. Most of it is bills, which Thaniel sets aside to deal with later. He opens the letter from Fanshaw first. In the man’s officiously friendly way, it tells him not to bother coming in to work at the Foreign Office for a good two weeks, no sir, not with that bullet wound and those dodgy lungs.

Thaniel doesn’t really know what to do with a vacation after he’s sort of just got back from one. He sits at the piano and plinks out some fragments for a while, until Mori comes down the stairs from the attic carrying a small plate and mug.

Thaniel takes a breath to thank him for settling breakfast for Six — he didn’t think she would be up so soon — but starts coughing instead. The muscles around his chest and ribs resignedly dredge up the old pains. If it were possible for a body part to express an emotion, this one could be summed up as _Oh alright, here we go again, I suppose._

The attack peters out soon enough. As Thaniel wheezes slightly, trying to get back the rhythm of his breathing, Mori touches his shoulder with one hand. The other is holding a cup of water ready for him. He’s making some sort of soothing, hushing sound. He’s also making a rather worried face at Thaniel.

Not trusting himself to speak yet, Thaniel merely pats his hand and offers him a slightly pained smile.

“You are _not_ going in to work,” Mori says flatly.

Oh. Right. It’s going to take Thaniel a while to get used to telling him things. Mori usually already knows them. “I’m not,” he agrees, then winces at how his own voice sounds. He accepts the water and drinks before trying again. “Fanshaw all but told me I’m fired if he sees me within the next fortnight.”

This seems to mollify Mori. He indicates the piano by tilting his chin. “I heard you playing something new?”

“It’s not done yet.” Thaniel is suddenly shy. The beginnings of his symphony have been lying fallow for weeks.

Mori hesitates. “I thought of working on a new lightbulb for Six.”

Thaniel smiles, suddenly sure Mori is as reluctant to be apart again as he is. “I’ll help you carry over your workbench,” he says quietly.

Something becomes slowly obvious to Thaniel over the subsequent weeks and then months. Mori is as gifted a clockmaker, as genius a craftsman, as he’s always been — but when he tinkers while Thaniel works on his music, he no longer feels untouchable, inhuman. There was always a veneer of self-assurance to him before, and now that he can no longer remember figuring out a new invention in the near future, it’s gone. 

Thaniel doesn’t bring it up. Not because Mori seems touchy about it; if anything, he seems to take greater joy in his work since success comes as a genuine surprise and he doesn’t know how long a setback will last. But if losing his clairvoyance has come with a silver lining, it’s also left a gaping void where many of Mori’s memories were. Thaniel hates reminding him of that, hates the insidious little voice of doubt that wonders if this placid life, with him, can make up for the loss.

“Yes?” he hears Mori say pleasantly, and turns to see him leaning down to address Katsu. From its spot underneath the table, the little octopus wriggles, thudding against the wood. “Ah, you’re stuck. Here we go.” Mori nudges until Katsu’s one wheel is free.

Thaniel watches Katsu zip off down the hallway, and after a few moments becomes aware of Mori’s eyes on him. He gestures at his rather rumpled score. “I think _I’m_ stuck.”

Mori nods. “Me too. Time for a tea break.”

After some rambling about colours and movements that probably sounds like gibberish to Mori, Thaniel suddenly gasps and grabs for a pen to jot down his epiphany. Then he listens while Mori shows him where he can’t seem to get the wings to open fluidly on a miniature owl. He starts playing a sequence of notes to match the gradient of hues he thinks the clicking gears should make, if they were to resemble Mori’s other work. He’s rewarded when, after several minutes of this, Mori gives a soft, “Oh!” and does something to the cogs that makes the colours match up.

When Thaniel returns to his composing in earnest, he writes that moment into the symphony, and sees the shape of it begin to make sense.

The house in Cornwall is ridiculous.

Thaniel makes sure to tell Mori this — several times, in fact — once he manages to pick his jaw up off the floor. “What did you do for Merrick Tremayne, to warrant this sort of generosity?” he asks, only half-jokingly.

He’s not expecting an honest reply, but Mori surprises him by giving him one after a brief, thoughtful silence. “I crippled his leg.”

Huh.

This only piques Thaniel’s interest more, but he clamps down before his curiosity can show on his face. “You don’t have to tell me,” he hastens to say, trying to outrun the darkness coming over Mori’s expression.

“No, I… I want to.” Mori gazes into the distance, to where Six is already exploring the courtyard. It takes visible effort, but he turns and focuses his gaze on Thaniel. “I want you to have all my secrets. If you’ll have them.”

Thaniel is no clairvoyant, but he hears the ghost of the words Mori could’ve said then. _If you’ll have me._

Mori picks up the bags Thaniel has set down by their feet, and goes to unlock the front door.

Being away from London makes it easier to breathe in more ways than one. The green of the grass sounds thrumming and low to Thaniel. And out around the estate, where they take the air to help Thaniel’s lungs, there’s no one else around for miles. They can hold hands and talk, and not have to look each other in the eye if they find they suddenly can’t.

Mori tells him things then, as if the openness of the space is contagious. Sometimes he launches into a tale, and the tension in his body warns Thaniel about the grim things to come. Other times he starts describing the intricacies of something innocuous, like beekeeping, and Thaniel is so absorbed in the anecdote that it throws him for a loop when Mori concludes it by announcing that Ito’s wife is allergic to bees, and letting Thaniel draw his own conclusions.

“Don’t you have any happy stories about yourself?” Thaniel says at last, pulling Mori to a stop by their linked hands. “I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself at all. You make yourself out to be this — this mastermind, or manipulator.”

When the silence stretches on, he looks up at Mori’s face to find that the other man is keeping his expression carefully blank. “I do manipulate people. I use them. Their lives, their deaths. I use them up.”

Thaniel knows from the look on his face that he’s thinking about Takiko again, and Midori. He squeezes Mori’s fingers. Because there’s nothing he can say to take away his guilt.

“New rule,” he says quietly. “For every bad thing you tell me you’ve done, you name a good one too.”

Mori wrinkles his nose in a gesture that nearly makes Thaniel laugh, it’s so clearly borrowed from one of Six’s more disagreeable moods. “What if I can’t think of one?”

“That’s okay.” Thaniel tugs him along to continue their walk. “I’ve got plenty. I can help.”

Owlbert doesn’t follow them there from London, so when Mori puts the finishing touches on his latest lightbulb for Six and presents it to her, Thaniel expects it to go down well.

It… really doesn’t.

“But why isn’t he here?” Six demands. “He goes where Mori goes.”

“Petal, it’s a long way for any bird to fly,” Thaniel reasons, frantically following several threads of thought at the same time. Namely: why would a lightbulb trigger this reaction, and why is the issue bothering her only now, days into their stay in Cornwall? Because she thought Owlbert would be joining them in his own time? Yes, likely: he remembers her making sure Thaniel brought along an old jumper especially for him. This gift of Mori’s signals to Six that he isn’t expecting her new friend to arrive here at all. Which in turn marks a significant departure from routine.

Mori sort of folds himself down rather than crouching like Thaniel, then addresses Six. “Owls don’t follow me around anymore, not since I… lost my memory,” he tells her. The rhythm of his words is jerky from uncertainty, but their tone is soothing. “I suspect Owlbert has been sticking around Filigree Street these past months for you.”

“So why hasn’t he followed me here?” Six asks, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

This is the point when Thaniel generally looks to Mori for some strange bit of logic that appeals uniquely to Six. He’s already offered the pragmatic reason: the distance. He resists the perennial urge to reach out and rub Six’s arm comfortingly. Instead, he waits for Mori’s next words.

Only they don’t come, and Six’s face crumples as she lets the lightbulb fall to the ground. It shatters spectacularly.

“Six!” Thaniel shouts, more out of surprise than real anger, but she turns and flees up the stairs. Before he can go after her, Mori’s hand lands heavily on his shoulder.

“It’ll be worse if we follow her now. Better to wait,” he says, then hesitates. “I think.”

Something in his voice makes Thaniel turn to see him sink into the nearest chair at the kitchen table. “Kei?” he says, and rests his hands on the other man’s knees.

“I used to always know what to say to her,” Mori explains after a long moment. “Oh — don’t kneel there, there’s glass.”

“I’ll clean up in a moment,” Thaniel says. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

Mori can’t seem to meet his eyes. “I used to know what would work with her, because I could remember her reactions.” He shrugs, and for a moment resembles the broken toy man that was Thaniel’s first impression of him, that first night after the Yard bombing. “I can’t anymore.”

Thaniel runs his thumbs absently over Mori’s knees while he takes this in. He anticipated there being consequences from losing his clairvoyance, but he’d always thought Mori was good with Six because their minds were wired the same way: intricate systems, clockwork and cogs.

“No parent is perfect,” he quotes suddenly, remembering the words from a telegram he read more than four years ago, when they first took in Six. “Or so Annabel says. At some point, despite your best intentions, you’ll make mistakes. You have to trust that you can fix them — or that your children grow up and fix you.”

Mori blinks, and Thaniel is bracing to deflect more self-denigration when instead he says, wonderingly, “You asked your sister for parenting tips…?”

Thaniel flushes. “I was suddenly raising a child with you, I panicked. I wanted to do right by you both.” Goodness knows, he hadn’t had the best role model in his own father.

There’s a peculiar sort of smile on Mori’s face, wry and almost sickly. “We really should have talked more about all this.”

Now there’s an understatement. But Thaniel only stands, presses a quick kiss to Mori’s temple, and goes to find a broom. Behind him, Mori stoops to pick the little owl up, sending glass shards falling to the floor with bursts of crystalline pink.

They find Six contrite and wearing what has unofficially become Owlbert’s jumper. She must have stolen it out of Thaniel’s suitcase. She pulls nervously at the sleeves.

“I’m not angry,” Thaniel assures her immediately, because she has difficulty reading expressions sometimes. “We just want to make sure you’re alright. Can I see your hands?”

He was already next to certain that the glass didn’t cut her, but he’s still relieved to see unbroken skin.

Mori takes a couple steps closer, which Six permits warily, her eyes huge.

“I won’t tell you that nothing’s changed,” he says, and Thaniel recognises a shadow of the self-assured way he always used to speak to Six, like an adult. “I’m different now. I’m better for me, but not for you. That, I have to learn.”

Thaniel’s breath catches slightly in his throat, but he doesn’t say anything.

Mori lifts his shoulders in a tiny, helpless shrug. “Will you give me time?”

Six seems to consider the question. Then, slowly enough that Mori can’t possibly be startled, and in plain sight, she inches forward and steals his watch, once again leaving its golden chain linking both of them.

Thaniel puts that into his symphony, too, after a long afternoon at the piano that Mori had arranged to be brought to the house in Cornwall. He replays the incident in his mind until all he can see are the colours from their abstracted figures in the room. And then he finds where it fits in the music, and weaves it all together, following a single thread through loops and stitches until it appears before him, transformed into a tapestry.

It’s not a complete one, not yet. But it’s substantial enough that he decides he needs to show it to Gilbert and Sullivan once they get back to London. He doesn’t let himself be nervous about showing them something that has been so private, so personal. He feels instinctively that he mustn’t let the music sit always in the dark of his coat pockets. There’s an exuberance to it that deserves better.

What would he even call this creation of his, though? He’s way out on a limb here, suddenly unsure if anyone would credit his effort. He sits back with a sigh, and only then notices Mori waiting beside him, carrying a tray of food.

He winces. “Sorry. I missed lunch, didn’t I?”

Mori raises an eyebrow. “This is dinner. You’re eating early, because I see you’ve ignored your sandwich.”

Ah. Thaniel picks up the plate guiltily and follows Mori into the kitchen. Now that he thinks about it, his head and back are throbbing quite terribly from hours at the piano without drinking water or moving much. Perversely, the pain is making it difficult for him to start on the meal. And Mori isn’t helping, watching him sternly from across the table.

He manages a couple of tiny bites while numbly making small talk at Mori before the other man calls him out. “Are you trying to distract me from the fact that you’re barely eating? It’s not working.”

Sheepishly, because admitting it is embarrassing enough, Thaniel says, “I… may have given myself a headache?”

Mori’s face changes. “How bad is it?”

Thaniel swallows thickly. “It’s a little. Nauseating, maybe.”

“Don’t force yourself to eat,” Mori says at once, and leans forward. “And don’t tense up.” 

That’s all the warning Thaniel gets before he pinches firmly at the skin between his left thumb and forefinger. The pressure isn’t that much, but he still yelps at first and tries to pull back. Mori holds him steady, apologetic yet insistent.

“A few more seconds,” he promises, and Thaniel wants to ask, hysterically, if his plan is to cause him enough discomfort in his hand to drown out the pain in his head. But he keeps quiet, and right on cue, the storm clears out of his head, leaving it feeling oddly empty.

Mori starts massaging the skin then, and continues until the faint imprint of his fingers fades. Thaniel hasn’t said a word, but he must have read his relief in the relaxing of his muscles.

“Is that a samurai thing?” he asks, when he can manage it.

“Chinese acupressure, actually.” Gingerly, Mori brushes a lock of hair back from Thaniel’s face. “If you ever do it yourself, press that point gently, then repeat on your right hand. I’m trained in the quicker way.”

Thaniel blinks, then layers on the teasing tone as he repeats, “Is _that_ a samurai thing?”

Mori picks up a small carrot from the tray just so he can throw it at Thaniel. He turns his face away, but Thaniel still glimpses his fond smile.

He eats in silence for a few minutes. Mori steals some of the food even though there’s more waiting on the counter, and Thaniel idly wonders if he knows his appetite isn’t fully back yet.

For a single, stricken moment, it occurs to him that it hasn’t been that long since the weeks in Japan when Mori mourned him before his death, muddling the timeline and experiencing in one fell swoop months or even years of his illness. Have those memories faded, mercifully, or is there an echo of horror for Mori in seeing Thaniel unable to stomach food for whatever reason?

“So,” he says, trying to keep his voice casual, “you told Six you’re better now, without your clairvoyance.”

Mori hums in agreement. “What of it?”

“Just — it’s the first time you’ve brought it up yourself. I wanted to be sure you meant it.”

Contemplatively, Mori nudges Thaniel’s soup bowl closer to him. He waits until Thaniel has swallowed three more spoonfuls before answering. “Nothing will take away the things I did because I could. The people I killed. The people I could’ve saved, and didn’t. But I feel… lighter, knowing I won’t have to choose anymore. Knowing I can’t.”

He gives Thaniel a sad smile, so quick it’s more like a flicker. “I needed to be stopped.”

“Yes, you do,” Thaniel says. “One bad thing, one good thing, that was the deal.”

Mori hesitates. “I fixed your headache?”

Thaniel gives him an unimpressed look until he relents. “Fine, fine.” He takes a disheartening while to think about it, but finally he says, “I arranged a train delay so that Grace would marry Matsumoto. Did I ever tell you?”

“No.” Thaniel can’t help but grin; silly of him, all these years, to think that could’ve been a coincidence. “See, you knew they’d be happy together, and so you intervened.”

A frown creases Mori’s brow. “Or I was apologising for stealing one husband from her. Or… or somehow, even then, I was positioning Grace in Japan, so that she would be one of the scientists who—”

He’s cut off when Thaniel picks up the same discarded carrot from earlier and lobs it back at him. He levels an incredulous look at him, then huffs twice in a sort of weary laughter. “Well,” Mori says, “I never could tell what you were going to do next.”

“I’m kind of your blind spot, then,” Thaniel remarks. That much had become painfully clear from the choice he’d made in Aokigahara, to return to Yoruji for Mori’s sake.

Mori cocks his head, his look almost wistful. “You’re like looking at the sun,” he says, and refuses to say anything more, not even when Thaniel points out how medically inadvisable that is, or how rubbish sunlight is in London, weak and insipid.

Lying beside him that night, Thaniel fiddles with their conversation as if it were a jewel bearing to be placed in clockwork. And he sees with sudden clarity what his symphony is about. It’s like the sun, like warmth and vitality… and joy.

Joy.

He invites Fanshaw to preview his composition at the same time as Sullivan. There’s no orchestra, and anyway some parts aren’t quite finished yet. But he plays the piano, he shows them the score, and he describes the rest of what he intends.

Sullivan is grinning by the time he’s even halfway through, and Fanshaw claps him on the back and says it’s the loveliest resignation letter he’s ever had the privilege of receiving. When they ask what the symphony is called, he tells them.

The fog season before his debut is the worst Thaniel has had.

It starts two weeks earlier than expected, and they have their first serious fight since that horrid time in Japan, right before Thaniel left to stay at the legation. Mori wants to leave for Cornwall at once, never mind the tickets they bought previously. Thaniel is nervous about conducting and stubbornly wants to get in all the rehearsal time he can, before leaving. He’s been tweaking the symphony as he goes along, learning from Sullivan, getting feedback from the musicians. He can’t imagine shirking something he’s dreamed about, to run and hide in the countryside.

But his dry cough becomes a honking, wracking one, and settles deep in his chest, where it digs a burrow of red pain. After three days of Mori tiptoeing around the house, fetching him hot water wordlessly and watching him with vast disapproval, Thaniel feels taut as a violin string. He hates this permanent feeling of weakness, hates the way Six flees to her attic in worry that she can’t articulate and he can’t alleviate. He hates too-politely asking Mori to see to her while he curls up in their bed to sulk and — above all — try to breathe.

This takes too much concentration for him to doze off. But he lies still anyway, closing his eyes and hoping for sleep.

Despite the tension between them, he’s relieved when he hears Mori enter the room quietly, trying not to wake him. There’s all the familiar, soft sounds of him changing into pyjamas. These appear in muted greys and browns against Thaniel’s eyelids. Then comes the light yellow susurrus of Mori sliding under the covers.

He must do a better job feigning slumber than he thinks, because Mori can’t mean for him to witness what he does next.

He curls up next to Thaniel, foetal and fragile, with one arm resting alongside his ribcage. He keeps it there for several heartbeats, feeling the unsteady rise and fall in the darkness of the room. “Please be okay,” Mori whispers. “Please.” His breath hitches. His voice is the most thready gold Thaniel has ever heard.

Tears well up hot and full in his eyes, and he slowly tilts his head so they’ll fall on the far side of the pillow.

The next morning, he tells Mori they can leave immediately. He accepts Mori’s relieved embrace, even though it’s rather tight for his straining lungs. He squeezes back, trying to communicate without words how sorry he is.

Six stays in London that winter, under the care of the Haverly family. Thaniel protests at first, thinking that Mori talked her into such a sacrifice, but then he catches the wary look she gives him and realises she must have volunteered. It’s easier for her to distance herself. So he subsides, and lets her, and tries not to think about whether Mori might wish to do the same.

They can’t go on long walks like they did last year. Thaniel gets tired too quickly. He becomes very aware that when he’s halfway to exhaustion, they need to stop and turn around. This narrows his world down to a fixed radius, into which Mori follows him like an orbiting moon.

He finds it easier to fall asleep if he can hear Mori speaking to him, if he can watch his voice from behind closed eyes. Mori seems to intuit this somehow, and stays up telling stories to Thaniel. Without prompting, he follows the rule they agreed on. One cruel or callous action, one kind or considerate one.

Thaniel learns many disparate things about the man he loves in this string of listless days. About his family, about his stint as a government aide, about his clockwork — of course. Some nights, probably when Mori believes Thaniel isn’t lucid enough to understand him, he talks about what little he remembers of being imprisoned and tortured. He recounts not what he did, but what was done to him, and still he blames himself. Still he sounds as though he believes he deserves all this and more.

Thaniel stirs and lifts a hand to get Mori’s attention. Immediately he leans closer. “Water?” he asks.

But Thaniel shakes his head. “Name a good thing now,” he rasps. “A good thing that happened to you.”

He isn’t expecting a quick answer; all the other times he’s prompted Mori to come back out of his self-hating thoughts, it’s taken some time. But unerringly, without a trace of doubt in his voice, Mori replies, “You. You’re the best thing.”

Thaniel coughs some more then, his eyes watering from the pain and Mori’s words. “Even now?” he asks wryly, as soon as he can.

Mori interlaces their fingers and presses a kiss to his knuckles. “Of course. I get to look after you. I get to worry about you. You’re not a ghost to me, nor a burden. I lost you once. I won’t give you up again.”

Thaniel stares. “Now I _know_ I’m on my deathbed.”

“Don’t even joke like that,” Mori says wetly. “The last time I thought you’d died, I got stuck in Paris for three weeks.”

A beat.

“You told me you were sick, in Paris,” Thaniel says slowly. “You were…” His throat closes around the words. “You were mourning me.”

“I hadn’t been summoned to Japan yet, but I’d tricked Russia into deploying ships,” Mori explains. “So… yes. I mourned you. I quite fell apart. Because you’d died, stuck in England that summer, thinking I never came back.”

There’s nothing he can say to that, really, and so Thaniel only clasps his hand closer. “Lie down, already,” he tells Mori. “You hardly rest.”

Mori obeys. But after another long pause, he says in a small voice, “I think Six has forgiven me. Have you?”

Thaniel struggles back to alertness and frowns at his dim silhouette. “What on earth for?”

“I’m better for me, but not for you,” Mori says dully, repeating what he told Six almost a year ago. He pauses, then spells it out for Thaniel. “If I could still remember the future, I’d have known about the fog season starting early. We—”

“Kei. _No._ ” Thaniel almost recoils in horror. “You can’t seriously be blaming yourself.”

“You’re not contradicting me,” Mori points out. His voice comes to Thaniel across what suddenly feels like a gulf of understanding between them that he’s only now noticing.

He pulls him close in the dark, this broken man, this hollow boy. “When are you going to learn,” Thaniel murmurs, “that I love you for you, not what you can do for me?”

That night is the only time he ever hears Mori cry. He holds him desperately close, and thinks that if he must go before his time, this is one task he must accomplish. Fixing the clockmaker himself.

By the time they return to London, Thaniel’s cough has subsided and he can manage the stairs at home. He consults with Dr Haverly briefly, and is vindicated when the man lifts his morning cup of tea to salute Mori’s efforts at nursing Thaniel. Mori ducks out of sight from the window, from which he was watching them not too subtly.

If he still feels frail at all, getting back into his routine of symphony preparations is just what he needs to regain strength. There’s the music itself, for starters: he makes his final tweaks to the dynamics and articulation while sitting in Mori’s workshop, smiling to himself as he translates the grace of his movements to the score. Then he enlists help from Six. He has this borderline-crazy idea about lightbulbs in violins.

Every part of this performance, Thaniel feels, must speak to Mori, remind him of their long conversations, their stolen time. If the worst happens, he thinks, if he is consumptive and this is the last thing he finishes, he wants it to linger with Mori. He wants it greeting him in the mornings like a warm cup of tea. He wants it chasing away his self-hatred with the indelible fact that he _was_ known, and loved, in his entirety. 

He wants it to tip his chin up for the memory of a kiss in the dark.

And when Grace approaches him on the night of the performance, talking about a microscope and bacterium and clinical trials — Thaniel knows Mori has done the very same for him, in his own way. Suddenly his tribute no longer needs to be a swan song, or a memorial. He feels light and floaty because now, the music is only a beginning.

Here are their grand gestures to each other: a symphony, a war. All only overtures to the real gift: a life together. Love. Enough time.

They have time.


End file.
